Who ruled Caracas?

Caracas fills a narrow mountain valley about 900 metres above sea level, cut off from the Caribbean by the wall of El Ávila and linked to its port at La Guaira by a steep road. The valley's mild climate and fertile soil drew Spanish settlers inland from the hot coast. Founded in 1567, it became the capital of colonial Venezuela, the birthplace of Simón Bolívar and one of the first cities to break with Spanish rule, in 1810. In the twentieth century oil money turned it from a small colonial town into a sprawling modern capital.

The valley was home to Carib-speaking peoples, and its inhabitants resisted early Spanish attempts at settlement in the 1560s under leaders such as Guaicaipuro. On 25 July 1567 the conquistador Diego de Losada founded Santiago de León de Caracas, naming it after the local people. In 1577 the governor of the province of Venezuela moved his seat there from Coro. Through the colonial period the province came under the courts of Santo Domingo and later the Viceroyalty of New Granada, so the map's New Spain is only a rough label for the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean.

Caracas lived on cacao. Plantations in the surrounding valleys, worked by enslaved Africans, supplied cacao beans to Mexico and Spain and made a small creole elite, the mantuanos, very rich. From 1728 to 1785 a Basque trading firm, the Guipuzcoan Company, held a monopoly over the trade, causing deep resentment. In 1777 Caracas became the capital of a new Captaincy General of Venezuela, which joined the scattered provinces into a single unit for the first time.

Bolívar was born in the city in 1783 into a mantuano family. On 19 April 1810 the town council of Caracas removed the Spanish captain general, and on 5 July 1811 a congress declared Venezuela independent. On 26 March 1812 a severe earthquake destroyed much of the city and killed thousands, and royalist clergy presented it as divine punishment for rebellion. The wars of independence that followed were among the most destructive in Spanish America, and the city's population fell sharply. After the patriot victory at Carabobo in 1821, Caracas was part of Gran Colombia, and in 1830 it became the capital of a separate Venezuela.

For much of the 19th century the country was torn by civil wars. Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who dominated politics from 1870 to 1888, gave the capital a Capitol building, boulevards and a Pantheon for national heroes, but Caracas stayed a modest colonial town into the 1930s.

Oil production from the 1920s transformed Venezuela. From the 1940s and especially under the military government of the 1950s, Caracas was rebuilt with motorways, tower blocks and the Ciudad Universitaria designed by Carlos Raúl Villanueva, while migrants from the countryside and abroad settled in self-built barrios on the hillsides. Democracy returned in 1958. When oil prices fell, riots known as the Caracazo broke out in February 1989 and were put down with hundreds of deaths. Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, and from the 2010s a deep economic and political crisis drove millions of Venezuelans abroad. In January 2026 United States forces struck targets in Caracas and seized President Nicolás Maduro, and in June 2026 strong earthquakes caused serious damage in the city and on the nearby coast. The metropolitan area has around five million people.